New Idea For Sharing Urban Roads? Sidewalks Removed on Busy London Street Forces Drivers to Slow

It's a revolutionary change in traffic thinking. Sidewalks have been eliminated on a newly reconstructed stretch of Exhibition Road , in downtown London. The busy thoroughfare has been changed from the traditional sidewalk-and-road arrangement into a continuous smooth surface that is shared by pedestrians, bikers and drivers. There are no crosswalks, lane markings, sidewalks, curbs, signs or railings. What you see (above) is what you get: a long road with large black and white granite cross-hatching. It's a perfect place for a pedestrianized route because three huge museums and a university front onto it and there are 11.5 million visitors a year to the area. The concept for this "shared space" derives from a Dutch traffic engineer, Hans Monderman . It is a different way of looking at roads: Shared space removes the traditional segregation of motor vehicles, pedestrians an...